Page 28 of Libby's London Merchant
“No, nothing. I asked him this evening when he was lucid, and he said he feared he would throw it back up. I did not press him.”
“He is probably right. It is often that way with drunks,” the doctor said.
“Oh, pray don’t call him that,” she said quickly.
“Has our mysterious candy merchant taken your fancy?” he asked. “That is what he is, my dear, a drunkard, and destined to remain so unless we can dry him out.’’
Idly, he placed his fingertips against the merchant’s neck for another check of the pulse. “And so he will remain, more like. I wonder what it was that started him drinking? He appears to be a merchant of some substance, if one can credit the quality of his suit.”
“A merchant at the very least,” said Libby. “Sir, you should have heard him order me about. He sounded like a duke. Or at least a sergeant major.” She laughed. “He reminded me of Papa’s sergeants, especially when I did something to disturb the calm of the regiment.”
“You miss those days, don’t you?” Anthony Cook asked as he pulled up another chair and sat beside her.
“Oh, I do,” she said, animated and remembering. “I miss the marches, the cantonments, even the food sometimes. And the sound of Spanish, and the little children, the smell of camp fires . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked at the physician shyly. “But I am boring you.’’
“You couldn’t, Miss Ames, you couldn’t,” he murmured. He touched her wrist, his fingers going to her pulse without his even being aware of it. “When the gypsies arrive for the hop picking this summer, you will have to visit their campfires.”
“I shall,” she said, and moved slightly. He was sitting too close.
The physician remembered himself and laughed softly. “Good, steady rhythm! Beg pardon, Miss Ames. It is a habit. I suppose I would feel for the Prince Regent’s pulse, if I were ever to get so close.”
She smiled in the dark, charitable toward the bulk of a man who seemed so at ease beside her. “It is comforting to have a professional opinion that my heart beats.”
“Yours and others, too,” he said enigmatically, and then proceeded directly onto another tack. “I have been asking in Holyoke about our candy merchant. No one in the public houses or food warehouses has heard of our own Nesbitt Duke, although all are familiar with Copley’s Confections. Indeed, the food brokers tell me that as a rule, Copley’s does not venture on selling trips when the weather is warm.”
“How odd.” Libby could think of nothing intelligent to say. She felt a great stupidity settle over her that she could only credit to exhaustion.
The doctor stirred beside her and Libby roused herself sufficiently to remind him that the hour was late and he needed to be home.
In answer, Dr. Cook snapped open his watch and stared at it. “So it is,” he agreed. “I will take myself off if you will go to bed. Tomorrow, our mysterious London merchant should be hungry enough to eat oatmeal. It is what I hope, at any rate.”
He stood up then, the chair protesting as he left it. Dr. Cook shoved his hands deep in his pockets and stared down at his sleeping patient.
“Do you know, Miss Ames, I have wondered if drinking is a disease,” he said.
He looked at her quickly, ready to gauge her reaction. When she made no comment, but only dabbed at the merchant’s forehead, he continued, his voice less tentative.
“You’re a rare one, miss. Most people laugh me out of the room after a statement like that.”
She smiled and shook her head, her heart warming to this strange, yet open man. “After Joseph’s accident, Papa used to say to me, ‘What a mystery is the human body.’” Libby sighed and leaned back in her chair. “For all that we live in a modem age, sir, there’s much even doctors don’t know.”
She heard his chuckle. The doctor rattled the keys in his pocket and started for the door. “True, indeed, Miss Ames. You need only ask any barrister and he will tell you how little doctors know.” He sighed and fiddled with the door handle. “Or you need only ask any honest physician in practice. How little we know about anything. Do get some sleep, Miss Ames. Eventually.”
He paused. “I hear that he has snake fever. Despite the lateness of the hour, I was met by a curious little woman who told me to be very careful. I promised her that, I, too, was immune.’’
He nodded and left the room. In another moment, Libby heard the crash of the little hall table, victim of Dr. Cook’s late-night blundering, followed by a markedly unprofessional oath. Libby clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. Dr. Cook strikes again, she thought.
Libby’s plans to remain at the merchant’s bedside were disrupted an hour later by Candlow, who sat himself down across from her and fixed her with such an expression of sorrowful unease that she bowed to the pressure and retired to her bed. She had only the faintest memory of sinking into the welcome feather mattress.
Her own unease was replaced by optimism with the rise of the sun. Libby lay in bed, hands clasped behind her head, and thought of her father. “I disremember anyone ever made so glad by the mere rising of the sun,” he had declared to her on more than one occasion. “How simple you are, child.”
He was right, of course. She felt her spirits rise higher as she went to the window, leaned her elbows on the sill, and gazed out on as perfect a morning as Kent ever lavished on its inhabitants.
She sat in the window then for a moment, relishing the sun’s warmth. Perhaps the merchant would agree to some nourishment today. Perhaps he would disclose something about himself. And even if he did neither of those things, Libby knew she had the heart to get through another day, because the morning was so fair.
She dressed slowly, taking more time with her hair than her usual quick twist of the heavy braid and poking of pins here and there. She stood in thought a moment, a generous handful of shining brown hair in her hand and wondered if she ought to take a deep breath and cut it. “You’re dreadfully far from the mode,” Lydia had told her only days ago as she patted her own shorn locks and coaxed the little curls around her fingers.
But the weight of it felt good on top of her head. She decided to postpone the event and wait until Lydia returned from Brighton with new ideas about what was fashionable and what wasn’t. “For all I know, if I wait long enough, I will be a la mode again,” Libby said to the minor. “Not that it matters.”
